Libertalia is an amazing and original card game. During three campaigns, you have to gather doubloons and booty tiles to become the wealthiest pirate. Each turn, you play one card to try to be the first to choose which share of the booty will be yours. Of course, each card has special powers that completely break this "routine". One thing that makes Libertalia original is that everyone starts with the same set of cards. That's why you'll have to choose carefully which moment to play each card, and to try to read your opponents' strategies.

How to Play

The game consists of 3 campaigns, broken up into 6 days. Each day has 4 phases:

Phase 1: Sunrise

Phase 2: Day

Phase 3: Dusk

Phase 4: Night

In the first campaign, all players have an identical random set of 9 crew cards and 10 doubloons.

Phase 1: Sunrise In this phase, each player secretly chooses one crew card to play. Once everyone is ready, the players reveal their chosen crew members and place them on the cargo ship from lowest on the left to the highest on the right. If there is a tie, the lower tie breaker number goes the left of the higher. During this phase, all special actions that take place during sunrise happen from left to right.

Phase 2: Day The only thing that happens in this phase is all crew members with a day action must take it, in increasing order of rank. (lowest goes first).

Phase 3: Dusk Each crew must claim a booty token from below the ship. Tokens are chosen in decreasing order of rank (the opposite of Phase 2) so the highest ranking crew get the best selection of tokens. After a crew claims a booty and resolves their dusk action (if any) they are immediately placed in their player's den before the next booty is claimed (which is important if someone is claiming a sabre later.) In some circumstances there might be no more booty to claim when a crew's turn to claim is resolved which means they get no booty and go to their den empty handed.

Phase 4: Night The only thing that happens in this phase is crew members use their Night actions. The difference is all crew members in your den resolve their night actions every night. So that Barkeep (his action is to score you 1 doubloon each night) you played on day 1 of the current campaign, will keep paying you every night (as long as he stays alive.) Play those night cards early!

Note: All crew must resolve as much of their actions as possible, even if disadvantageous to themselves or their controller! The Brute might kill himself, the Cannoneer has to pay 3 gold even if there are no eligible crew in a den to kill, the Merchant will sell your set of jewels or treasure maps if you have no other sets of matching treasure.

After the 6th day of the campaign, the round is over. Players resolve all “end of campaign” actions of crew members still alive in their dens (yes, crew members can be killed). All used crew members are removed from the game. Each player adds up the value of their booty tokens and doubloons (returning them to the bank) and moves their score marker ahead on the track. Each player should have 3 cards left in their hand. These carry over into the next 2 campaigns.

To setup for the next campaign each player gets 10 new doubloons and add an identical random set of 6 crew cards to the three crew left over. Thus players may have a slightly different hand from each other going forward.

Rounds 2 and 3 play just like round 1. At the end of the game the player with the most victory points is the winner.